Why do the boys invent stories of Leper as a war hero? Yet Leper has been seduced by a recruiter for ski troops. Leper tells Gene that he has, in fact, deserted; he did so because the army was planning to give him a Section Eight discharge for insanity, which he says would have prevented him from ever finding work or leading a normal life. Gene makes a few uncertain comments and Leper suddenly breaks down, insulting him. Answer: Leper enlists after he sees the soldiers fighting on snow skis, he now sees race skiing as the evolution of skiing.
How does Finny react when the narrator says that he causes him to fall? Why does Finny apologize to Gene? Never accuse a friend of a crime if you only have a feeling he did it.
Ready to jump out of the tree Finny is shaken off and falls instead braking his leg. He puts on his clothes because he wanted to be similar to Finny. Phineas causes Gene to have a moment of panic, but he copes by suppressing his feelings by reminding himself that Finny is trying to sabotage his life.
Previous Next. Chapter 10 That night, Gene journeys to Leper's house. In retrospect, the narrator tells us that he would later in his life make this sort of journey repeatedly — in the military. He never actually got to the war, he said, since by the time he joined the enemy was retreating.
The bomb would put an end to things rather quickly. Gene knew that Leper was at home due to the not-so-cryptic "Christmas location" message in the telegram. On the way, he somehow convinces himself that Leper has escaped from spies, since he couldn't have "escaped" from the army. When he arrives at Leper's place in Vermont, it's morning.
Leper greets him and leads him into the dining room. Leper is acting strangely, and Gene notes that the corner of his lip is curling involuntarily. He's also jumpy, quick to anger, and perpetually about to cry.
Trying for normal conversation, Gene asks how long Leper will be home on furlough before he has to go back. In answering Leper's strange call, Gene experiences what the war will be for him — not terrifying combat, but long, dark journeys without a clear purpose. Now, as he travels through the night, Gene thinks about Leper's telegram, wondering — in a fantasy that rivals Finny's conspiracy theory about the war — if his friend's "escape" is really from wartime spies.
Even the description of the remote Vermont area where Leper lives — and has now retreated — emphasizes this sense of danger, with its bitter cold and wind, its snow and isolation. It is, to Gene's mind, a "death landscape. As Gene trudges toward the Lepellier house, he spies Leper standing at the window — alone, intent, immobile, not moving even to open the door. While Leper once skied happily to explore how animals took shelter in winter, now he himself desperately seeks refuge, hiding in his dining room, as if he were one of the beavers he once sought to study.
Clearly, Gene's arrival invades Leper's uneasy world, but Leper also harbors a revelation that will shake Gene's own self-image and vision of the future.
As a result, this chapter — the only one set entirely away from Devon — stands as a pivotal moment in the novel, because its drama sets in motion the action of the concluding three chapters as well as the tragic crisis of the story, which turns on Leper's reappearance at Devon.
The change in Leper, his alternating laughter and tears, makes clear that he has suffered a mental breakdown in the army. Agitated and defensive, Leper spits out the word he imagines Gene is thinking — "psycho. As if the mere mention of this pseudo-clinical term frees him, Leper suddenly pours out a stream of frighteningly true observations about Gene himself.
Leper declares that Gene pushed Finny out of the tree, because Gene is "a savage underneath. Accused and judged, Gene responds to his own dark instincts, his secret impulses, and knocks Leper from his chair, just as he once pushed Finny from the tree. Again, in a moment of blind anger, Gene strikes out at a friend, and, in his fury, embodies the brute emotions at the heart of war. Here, then, in a remote Vermont farmhouse, far from the action, war exists in Gene himself, as a confused burden of fear, anger, and blind impulse.
As his earlier recollection makes clear, Gene will never see combat, but in Leper — and in his own reaction to Leper — he sees the consequences of war dramatized in psychological terms. Leper's psychosis creeps outward, bringing on, in Gene, too, a crisis of identity. The confrontation, with its revelation about his nature, forces Gene to retreat into a comforting self-image, just as the emotionally wounded Leper has retreated to his home.
Embarrassed, confused, Gene imagines Leper's protective mother judging him in flattering terms, despite his angry attack on her son — as "a good boy underneath," rather than "a savage underneath.
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